The Explosions in Turkey

After twin bombings on Saturday in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said on national television that the attack was “the most painful incident in the history of the Turkish Republic.” It was certainly the deadliest. More than ninety people died and hundreds more were injured when the bombs—only seconds apart—went off near a peace rally at the Ankara train station. The demonstration had been organized to demand more democracy and an end to clashes between military forces and the Kurds, Turkey’s largest ethnic minority. A video captured the first explosion, behind a group of young men and women holding hands and doing a line dance. Red, yellow, and green banners, which had been carried by union workers and Kurdish activists, were draped over the bodies until they could be collected. The government was so shaken that it ordered a news blackout of “images that create a feeling of panic.” There were widespread reports of Twitter and other social media being delayed or cut off.

The attack was especially significant because it didn’t occur along Turkey’s volatile five-hundred-mile border with Syria, or in Istanbul, the pulsating metropolis once known for its espionage and intrigue. Ankara, in central Anatolia, is somewhat dull and industrial. It is the country’s second-largest city, and became the capital only after the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “has never faced a greater array of challenges,” Henri Barkey, the Turkish-born director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, in Washington, told me. The nation is scheduled to go to the polls on November 1st, amid unprecedented polarization. This will be the second vote since elections in June failed to form a new government. The poll is set for two weeks before Erdoğan hosts a summit of world leaders in the G20, despite the fact that Turkey’s dragging economy could soon disqualify it for inclusion in the group. Meanwhile, a fragile peace process with the Kurds, who account for almost twenty per cent of Turkey’s population, has collapsed. Clashes between ethnic groups, which first erupted in 1984, continue to flare up sporadically.

The country has also been sucked into regional chaos. Since civil war erupted in neighboring Syria, Turkey has absorbed some two million refugees, more than any other country. It refused for years to be drawn into the quagmire, but in July, as tensions escalated along the border, Erdoğan approved Turkish military raids and allowed warplanes from the U.S.-led coalition to use Incirlik Air Base, in the south. Islamic State fighters—some of whom may be Turks—have targeted Turkey, too. They took credit for a July bombing in a border town, which killed more than thirty people, and they may have ties to the Ankara attack. On top of it all, Russian warplanes, bombing targets in Syria, strayed into Turkish airspace last week.

Just four years ago, as the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East, Turkey was touted as the cool-headed model for democratic change in a Muslim country. Erdoğan had won praise for introducing more reforms than previous secular governments had, in the hope of eventually being admitted to the European Union. “Our country was built on four pillars: a democratic state, a secular state, a social state, and a state of law,” he told me in 2008. “If one of the four is missing, then the state is missing something.”

But like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Erdoğan has manipulated the political system, shifting between jobs as prime minister and President. He has redefined the powers of each role, depending on which one he holds. Last year, he moved into a new Presidential palace in Ankara, a symbol of his escalating authority–even though Turkey is still constitutionally a parliamentary state. Ak Saray, or the White Palace, as the building is known, is an opulent complex of more than a thousand rooms and two million square feet. The Washington Post reported that it has more than fifty times the floor space of the White House. By comparison, an opposition lawmaker charged, the stately Kremlin, in Moscow, looks “like an outhouse.”

Erdoğan’s leadership is increasingly autocratic. His party, the Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.), which has Islamist hues, has dominated the political scene since upset elections in 2002, and has evolved into Erdoğan’s personal tool. “The A.K.P. is still a party, but it’s also a patronage network in the service of Erdoğan’s ambitions,” Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “And as the economy has slowed and he’s become more authoritarian, Turks have begun to ask questions and revolt against the dominance of his party.”

Critics, Kurds, other Islamists, other parties, the military, the media—all have faced Erdoğan’s wrath. A day before the Ankara bombings, Bülent Keneş, the editor of Zaman, a major Turkish newspaper, became the latest in a series of journalists to be detained by the government. Keneş was held for tweeting insults at Erdoğan.

“Censorship is becoming increasingly widespread as the security situation continues to deteriorate amid a major political crisis,” Reporters Without Borders, an organization that monitors press freedoms, said last month. It called the growing repression “unconstitutional” and a violation of Turkey’s international commitments. “These measures not only restrict media freedom but will also fuel tension and deepen divisions in a society already on the brink of the precipice,” Johann Bihr, who covers Turkey for Reporters Without Borders, warned.

“After a decade of stability, it’s pretty clear that Turkey is returning to a previous era—like the late seventies, when forty-five hundred were killed in street violence between leftist and rightist forces, or after 1984, when war began with the P.K.K.,” Cook told me, referring to the Kurdish Workers’ Party, a militant group of Kurdish nationalists.

Modern Turkish politics, always complex, span a spectrum of hostile parties and messy disputes. Longstanding secular élites lost out when the A.K.P. won the largest bloc of votes in 2002. That dynamic held until last June, when Erdoğan’s party was unable to muster enough seats in parliament to form a government—the first time parliament has failed to do so in thirteen years. Opponents took an unusual tack: many voted for the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (H.D.P.), to insure that it would meet the ten-per-cent threshold to qualify for seats in parliament and thus prevent Erdoğan’s party from getting a majority. Henri Barkey says that Erdoğan “has been fuming ever since.” The President has publicly accused the H.D.P., a peaceful party, of having links with the P.K.K. militia. In the next election, Barkey said, “people are voting solely on the issue of Erdoğan. If he doesn’t get the majority in parliament, it’s the second consecutive failure in six months and will undermine his ability to govern.”

Enter the Islamic State, or ISIS, which occupies significant areas in Syria and Iraq. It has tried to exploit Turkey’s internal tensions for its own purposes, Amberin Zaman, a columnist for the independent Turkish news site Diken, told me. “ISIS can now organize within Turkey. It regards all Kurds as enemies,” because their brethren have been the only militia to defeat ISIS fighters, most notably in Kobani, the Kurdish town on Syria’s border with Turkey. Other Kurdish militias have also prevented ISIS fighters from taking Kurdish areas in northern Iraq.

There was no initial claim of responsibility for the Ankara bombs. But ISIS was widely considered to be a top suspect. “What we’re looking at,” Zaman said, “is a battle between the Kurds and ISIS within Turkey’s borders.” ISIS could have two goals, Barkey said. It might want “revenge, and to punish Kurds” for its losses on the battlefield in the past year. “Goal No. 2 is to deliberately increase polarization between the A.K.P., the ruling party of the President, and the Kurds, the largest minority. It may also have been an attempt to sabotage a P.K.K. ceasefire with the government that everyone knew was coming.” It’s a kind of tactical tit-for-tat on different turf.

ISIS could have two goals, Barkey said. It might want “revenge, and to punish Kurds” for its losses on the battlefield in the past year. “Goal No. 2 is to deliberately increase polarization between the A.K.P., the ruling party of the President, and the Kurds, the largest minority. It may also have been an attempt to sabotage a P.K.K. ceasefire with the government that everyone knew was coming.” It’s a kind of tactical tit-for-tat on different turf.

Erdoğan appealed for support after the bombings. “Like other terror attacks, the one at the Ankara train station targets our unity, togetherness, brotherhood and future,” he said Saturday, in a statement. “The greatest and most meaningful response to this attack is the solidarity and determination we will show against it.” He probably meant, specifically, at the polls in three weeks.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.

This article was originally published in The New Yorker.